Fox Attacking a Cock

By the middle of the 1850s, animal painting had become a thriving business across Europe. Collectors wanted wildlife and farmyard life rendered with close, almost zoological accuracy, and a skilled painter of hounds, stags and game could make a steady living at it. Benno Adam worked in Munich as exactly that kind of specialist. In 1855 he set down this small, sudden drama of the barnyard: a fox that has broken in and seized a cock. The German title says it flatly, a fox taking a rooster for its prey. It is the sort of subject the period prized, a scrap of real country violence rather than a tidy still life, the animal caught in the act. Adam gives the fox and the bird the same careful attention a portraitist would give a sitter.